20223: Simidor: Aristide's Last Great Disservice

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>


Aristide’s Last Great Disservice to Haiti (1)

The whole country, minus a few pockets of Aristide loyalists in the
 slums,(2)  had turned against the President.  The general feeling in the
 country was: “Titid, you’d better leave before you wreck what’s left of
 the country.”  In places like Thomazeau, where there had not been a
 political protest in 100 years, hundreds, perhaps thousands of ordinary
 people were out in force calling on the president to resign.  But
 Aristide, believing that adulation from the people was his everlasting
 due, would not listen.  The more people turned out to protest against
 him, the more he insisted it was a “tizuit,” a tiny minority that was
 “plotting” against him.  And to prove his point, he unleashed the fury of
 his partisans against the whole nation.

 In broad daylight and in full view of the international press, the
 chimères would be somewhat restrained.  They pelted demonstrators with
 rocks, with bottles filled with piss; they used whips and slingshots to
 drive the protesters off the streets.  But at night and in the slums,
 blunt deadly force was used aplenty to keep the teeming masses from
 swelling the ranks of the opposition.  There is a rule of thumb about
 demonstrations: only the most advanced engage in street protests.  When
 you see 10 or 50 thousand in the streets, you can count on ten times that
 many, equally dissatisfied, but sitting at home.

 The mass protests began in earnest after Lavalas’ Dec. 5 bloody attack on
 the University.  The battle was joined.  All across the country and
 across class barriers, ordinary people  – the middle-class, the
 countryside, a section from the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, the
 urban poor – were sending a clear message to the government: enough is
 enough.  The nation in order to survive and to develop its potential had
 to close the book on the past, on the old ways of running the business of
 the country.  This was a profoundly democratic national endeavor that
 went beyond the fetters of electoral politics – vote every 4 or 5 years,
 and learn to put up with the crap in between.

 Some vested interests, not just Aristide, saw this movement as a threat.
 Somewhere along the way, the dominant families reached a consensus among
 themselves that the use of force was the best way to deal with Aristide.
 (It is one of Aristide’s personal trait that he will use force against a
 weaker adversary, but only ruse against those who can confront or
 retaliate against him.)  But beyond Aristide himself, the bourgeoisie had
 an overriding interest in limiting the scope of the revolt, in preventing
 a popular democratic revolt from taking root.

 The antagonism between Lavalas and the Haitian bourgeoisie was a fertile
 ground in terms of reseeding or rekindling the flame of grassroots
 mobilization.  The Gonaives armed uprising may or may not have been a
 spontaneous outgrowth from the democratic revolt in Port-au-Prince.   The
 two movements hold similar and different configurations, however.
 Gonaives was more “lumpen,” prone to violence, and involved a breakaway
 Lavalas militia.  But it is significant that the Gonaives armed uprising
 held its ground for several weeks, as the proverbial fish in the water.
 The population of Gonaives had joined the rebellion against Aristide.
 The domino effect that followed signaled the deliquescence of the state.
 The police, local Lavalas officials, were fleeing all over the place,
 ahead of a possible attack.  Undermined by the Lavalas virus, the
 decrepit state was falling apart.

 It may be that Buteur Metayer was his own man, with or without support
 from Port-au-Prince.  But Guy Philippe and his exile gang were clearly
 pawns in a larger strategic game.  Their cohesion, crisp uniforms,
 sophisticated weapons, and easy access across the border, spoke of a
 well-groomed and well-funded force, with logistical support and political
 connections with the Dominican Republic, the CIA and the dominant
 families in Port-au-Prince.  Their impact would be both military and
 psychological.

 The attack on Cap-Haitien was a well-orchestrated operation.  Although
 their numbers were roughly equal to the local police force (not to
 mention the hundreds of armed Lavalas militias busily terrorizing the
 unarmed population), they took control of the city with a minimum of
 resistance.  It was an operation that could be duplicated anywhere in the
 country, except in Port-au-Prince where Aristide had himself surrounded
 by several hundred well-paid and heavily armed special forces, and some
 2,000 armed militias.  In addition, the Port-au-Prince slums were Lavalas
 strongholds that could unleash hundreds of hungry and angry people into
 action.

 The rebels’ handlers knew quite well they could not overtake
 Port-au-Prince militarily, but whereas the number of actual “rebels” was
 limited (they were never more than two or three hundred), their
 psychological impact was ten times greater.  It is that psychological
 impact, and Aristide’s own delusions and weaknesses that explain his
 ultimate flight in the middle of the night.  Guy Philippe’s photogenic
 personality might have played well for the cameras, but it was Jodel
 Chamblain’s solid reputation as a mass murderer that eventually spooked
 Aristide and pushed him over the edge.

 Was there a coup?  Yes, there was clearly one in the making, aside from
 the democratic opposition.  But the chicken flew the coop before the
 actual blow was delivered.  Aristide thought he could sweet-talk Bush
 into shielding him from a coup that the US had more than a hand in
 fomenting. But somebody in the Bush administration finally helped him to
 see the light (told him the blunt truth).  Titid finally saw what time it
 was, and he knew it was time to leave.  He signed his resignation letter
 before getting on that plane.

 His resignation, by the way, had nothing to do with “avoiding a
 bloodbath.”  If that were his intention, Aristide would have left a taped
 message inviting the nation, inviting his partisans in particular, to a
 truce.  Though he claimed he was willing to die for his country, Aristide
 had too many assets to live for.  In the end, he chose to save his hide,
 with the option of coming back to make more trouble in the future.

 That time has already come.  Aristide has confided to the Guadeloupe
 writer Claude Ribbe that he’s “not cut for a life in exile,” and that he
 wants to return to his old job.  After all, he claims, “My letter of
 resignation was not a formal one.”  Once again, Aristide didn’t mean what
 he said.  The proverbial “Ti Malis” had made his departure conditional.
 “If it takes my resignation to avoid a bloodbath,” he wrote, “I accept to
 leave, with the hope there will be life instead of death.”  There is a
 naïve belief in the Creole language that as long as you say “if,” you did
 not actually commit yourself.  You achieve the same effect by grounding
 your big toe in the dirt when you swear something.  This is the subtext
 of Aristide’s resignation letter: I did not really resign, I said “if.”
 And the magic “if” is already working its power.

 Still, one thing is true: Aristide is out for good.  The wheel of history
 has already passed him by.  Yet he can make plenty of trouble from
 abroad.  Unless there is a sustained effort to address the needs of the
 sufferers in Haiti, the chaos he has started will continue.  There are
 two things that will close the chapter for good on Aristide.  One is full
 disclosure on his corruption.  The US will have a complete file on that
 chapter once they debrief whoever among the Steele Foundation mercenaries
 was keeping tab on Aristide for the CIA.  The second is a mammoth
 demonstration, or demonstrations, across the country, to signify to the
 thief of Tabarre that he’s out for good.

 Anyone of these two measures will do.  But taken together they would
 strike a powerful blow on the side of democracy and accountability.  Will
 the US release its file on Aristide’s corruption, or will they, as in the
 case of the FRAPH documents, find it more expedient to cover their own
 tracks – with the option of blackmailing Aristide for more information
 for their own dirty files?  Time will tell.

 For now, the crisis is far from over.  It is in people’s lives, in the
 barren countryside, in the collapse of the state.  A change of government
 from A to B, from Aristide to Boniface, from Neptune to Latortue, will
 mean very little.  The grandiose deployment of international forces is
 but a band-aid – unless they take on the dangerous job of disarming the
“rebels” and Lavalas armed gangs in a real way.  Will a UN intervention three months from now make a difference?  Nothing is less certain.  The best hope of addressing the crisis lies in the resurrection of the December 5 democratic movement.

Daniel Simidor


 ( 1)   	This will make up for Master Chamberlain’s great
 dissatisfaction with my last forwarded article.